Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (18 page)

strange warmth, hot and cold females,

I make good love, but love isn’t just

sex. most females I’ve known are

ambitious, and I like to lie around

on large comfortable pillows at 3 o’clock

in the afternoon, I like to watch the sun

through the leaves of a bush outside

while the world out there

holds away from me, I know it so well, all

those dirty pages, and I like to lie around

my belly up to the ceiling after making love

everything flowing in:

it’s so easy to be easy—if you let it, that’s all

that’s necessary.

but the female is strange, she is very

ambitious—shit! I can’t sleep away the day!

all we do is eat! make love! sleep! eat! make love!

my dear, I say, there are men out there now

picking tomatoes, lettuce, even cotton,

there are men and women dying under the sun,

there are men and women dying in factories

for nothing, a pittance…

I can hear the sound of human lives being ripped to

pieces…

you don’t know how lucky we

are…

but you’ve got it made, she says,

your poems…

my love gets out of bed.

I hear her in the other room.

the typewriter is working.

I don’t know why people think effort and energy

have anything to do with

creation.

I suppose that in matters like politics, medicine,

history and religion

they are mistaken

also.

I turn on my belly and fall asleep with my

ass to the ceiling for a change.

you shoulda been at this party,

I know you hate parties

but you seem to be at most of them.

anyhow, I took my girl, you know

her—

Java Jane?

yes, this party was at the merry-go-round

where they are trying to tear the pier down, you

know where that is?

yes, the red paint, the broken

windows—

yes, anyhow, my girl lives in a room just above the

merry-go-round. it’s a

birthday party for the woman who owns the

merrry-go-round.

she’s trying to save the pier

she’s trying to save the merry-go-round—

plenty of drinks for everybody, my girl lives in the

room right above the

merry-go-round.

sounds great.

I phoned. you weren’t

in.

it’s all right.

well, there was plenty to drink and they turned the

merry-go-round on, it was free, music and

everything.

sounds great.

my girlfriend and I got into an

argument, all the drinking—

of course.

I’m standing apart from her

she’s standing apart from me.

she’s got a glass of wine in her hand.

I give her a dark green deathly stare,

she’s stricken

she steps back

the thing is whirling

a horse’s hoof kicks her in the ass.

she drops down upon the spinning.

it all happens so fast—

but I do notice

that all the time she’s circling

to the music under those horses

she’s holding her glass upright

in order not to spill a

drop.

brave.

sure. only all the time her panties are

showing. glowing and glistening.

pink.

wonderful. how do they do it?

they conspire.

the glistening pink?

yes. so her panties are showing and I think

well, that’s all right but it probably looks

a hell of a lot better to them than it does to

me, so I moved a step forward and said,

Jane.

what happened?

she kept spinning around holding her drink up

showing her pink bottom…there seemed something

tenuous about it, deliciously inane…

stunted glory finally comes forth hollering…

exactly. she kept gliding around

legs outspread—

dizzied with life—

vengeful—

she must have cared for me to show her

panties to all those

people. anyhow, she kept sliding around

until her leg hit one of this guy’s legs—

he’d stepped forward for a closer look.

he was 67 years old and with his wife

and they were both

eating spaghetti off paper plates, anyhow,

my girl’s leg hit his

she came bouncing off on her ass

still holding the glass of wine upright.

I walked over and picked her up

and she still held it

level, then she lifted it and

drank it.

sounds like it was a

fine party.

I phoned. you weren’t

in.

spiderwebs of dripping

wet-dew sex like

badbreath dreams.

exactly. you should have been

there.

sorry.

the kid went back to New York City to live with a woman

he met in a kibbutz.

he left his mother at the age of

32, a well-kept fellow, sense of humor and never

wore the same pair of shorts

more than one day. there he was

in the Puerto Rican section, she had a

job. he wanted iron bars on the windows and

ate too much fried chicken at 10 a.m.

in the morning after she went to

work. he had some money saved out of the

years and he fucked but he was really

afraid of

pussy.

I was sitting with Eileen in Hollywood

and I said:

I ought to warn the kid

so that when she turns on him

he’ll be

ready.

no, she said, let him be happy.

I let him be

happy.

now he’s back living with his

mother, he weighs three hundred and ten pounds

and eats all the time

and laughs all the time

but you ought to see his

eyes…

the eyes are sitting in the center of all that

flesh…

he bites into a chicken leg:

I loved her, he says to me,

I loved her.

she was in her orange Volks waiting

as I walked up the street

with 2 six packs and a pint of scotch

and she jumped out

and began grabbing the beerbottles and

smashing them on the pavement

and she got the pint of scotch and

smashed that too,

saying: ho! so you were going to get her

drunk on this and fuck her!

I walked in the doorway where the other woman

stood halfway up the stairs,

then
she
ran in from the street

and up the stairs and hit the other woman

with her purse, saying:

he’s my man! he’s my man!

and then she ran out and

jumped into her orange Volks

and drove away.

I came out with a broom

and began sweeping up the glass

when I heard a sound

and there was the orange Volks

running on the sidewalk

and on me—

I managed to leap up against a wall

as it went by.

then I took the broom and began sweeping up

the glass again,

and suddenly she was standing there;

she took the broom and broke it into three

pieces,

then she found an unbroken beerbottle

and threw it at the glass window of the door.

it made a clean round hole

and the other woman shouted down from the

stairway: for God’s sake, Bukowski, go with

her!

I got into the orange Volks and we

drove off together.

each man must realize

that it can all disappear very

quickly:

the cat, the woman, the job,

the front tire,

the bed, the walls, the

room; all our necessities

including love,

rest on foundations of sand—

and any given cause,

no matter how unrelated:

the death of a boy in Hong Kong

or a blizzard in Omaha…

can serve as your undoing.

all your chinaware crashing to the

kitchen floor, your girl will enter

and you’ll be standing, drunk,

in the center of it and she’ll ask:

my god, what’s the matter?

and you’ll answer: I don’t know,

I don’t know…

the motion of the human heart:

strangled over Missouri;

sheathed in hot wax in Boston;

burned like a potato in Norfolk;

lost in the Allegheny Mountains;

found again in a 4-poster mahogany bed

in New Orleans;

drowned and stirred with pinto beans

in El Paso;

hung on a cross like a drunken dog

in Denver;

cut in half and toasted in

Kalamazoo;

found cancerous on a fishing boat

off the coast of Mexico;

tricked and caged at Daytona Beach;

kicked by a nursery maid

in a green and white ghingham dress,

waiting table at a North Carolina

bus stop;

rubbed in olive oil and goat-piss

by a chess-playing hooker in the East Village;

painted red, white, and blue

by an act of Congress;

torpedoed by a dyed blonde

with the biggest ass in Kansas;

gutted and gored by a woman

with the soul of a bull

in East Lansing;

petrified by a girl with tiny fingers,

she had one tooth missing,

upper front, and pumped gas

in Mesa;

the motion of the human heart goes on

and on

and on and on

for a while.

my moustache is pasted-on

and my wig and my eyebrows

and even my eyes…

then something stuns me…

the lampshades swing, I hear

simmering and magic and

incredible sounds.

I know I went mad, almost as

an act of theory:

the lost are found

the sick are healthy

the non-creators are the

creators.

even if I were a comfortable, domesticated

sophisticate I could never drink the

blood of the masses and

call it wine.

why did I have to lift that pretty girl’s

car by the bumper because the jack got stuck?

I couldn’t straighten up

and they took me away like a pretzel and straightened

me but I still couldn’t move…

it was the hospital’s fault, the doctors’ fault.

then those two boys dropped me on the way to the

x-ray room…I hollered LAWSUIT!

but I guess it was that girl’s fault—

she shouldn’t have shown me all that leg

and haunch.

listen, listen, SPACESHIT LOVE, TORN IN DRIP OUT,

SPACESHIT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE; KILL, LEARN TO USE A

WEAPON; OPEN AREAS, REALIZE, BE DIVINE, SPACESHIT

LOVE, IT’S approaching…

I did a take-off of E.H. in my first novel,

been living green ever since. I’m probably

the best journalist America ever had, I can

bullshit on any subject, and that counts for

something. you admire me much more

than the first man you meet on the street

in the morning, basically, though, it’s a

fact, I’ve lived during an era of no writers

at all, so I’ve earned a position

because nothing else appeared. o.k.,

it’s a bad age. I suppose I am number

one. But it’s hardly the same as when we

had giants turning us on. forget it:

I’m living green.

I was a bad writer, I killed N.C. because I made

more of him than there was, and then the
ins

made more of my book than there was. there have

been only 3 bad writers in acceptable American

literature. Drieser, of course, was the worst.

then we had Thomas Wolfe, and then we had me. but

when I try to choose between me and Wolfe, I’ve

got to take Wolfe. I mean as the worst. I like

to think of what Capote, another bad writer said

about me: he just typewrites. sometimes even

bad writers tell the truth.

my problem, like most, is artistic preciousness. I

exist, full of french fries and glory

and then I look around, see the Art-form, pop into

it and tell them how fine I am and what I think.

this is the same tiresomeness that has almost destroyed

art for centuries. I made a record once of

myself reading my poems to a lion at the zoo. he really

roared,
as if he were in pain, all the poets play

this record and laugh when they get drunk.

remember my novel about jail where

photos of heroes and lovers floated against the

rock walls?

I got famous. I came over here.

I got hot for the black motorcyclists of Valley

West and Bakersfield

who took my fame and jammed it

and made me suck their loneliness and dementia

and their dream of Cadillac white soul and

Cadillac black soul

and they creamed up my ass

and into my nostrils and into my ears

while I said, Communism, Communism

and they grinned and knew I didn’t mean it.